Lesson learned:)

Some things I've learned about beans, particularly pole beans:

Thin them before they begin to vine!!!!!!! Sure, we probably should've known better - but we're busy and it didn't seem like a big deal until I'd spent four hours of a Saturday gently (read: s-l-o-w-l-y) and methodically unravelling bean vines. Since we hadn't installed the trellising system yet, they had nothing to wrap themselves around except each other. It was painstaking work - but the good news is, since it's been several weeks since this happened, we know it didn't damage any of them. I was worried because some of them broke, and some of them looked very wilted after the whole ordeal. But they bounced back. It was like unraveling a huge ball of delicate chain necklaces that all look exactly the same. I wish I had a picture of how inter-twined the vines were, but I was too focused on the task at hand.

The other thing - stay on top of the weeds. Once we installed the bird netting, we weren't able to weed...and once we took the bird netting off, we prioritized thinning the beans over weeding, for better or worse. Then the beans got too tall to reach in and weed, particularly with the trellising in the way. This is one of the biggest changes I would make next year - I think I would have spent less time weeding overall if I had made more of an effort early on to hoe the small weeds. I would also use bark or grass clippings or some sort of mulch, to suppress the weeds. On the beds we prepared and planted later, we've done this, and it's made a PHENOMENAL difference.

By the way, all of the beans that we thought were bush beans have turned out to be bush beans. This is a relief, since I was worried about trellising in an earlier post. And although I'm irritated that the cannellini beans are bush instead of pole, it hasn't caused any practical problems.